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Is It Ever O.K. to Name Rape Victims?

By Nicholas Kristof February 4, 2010 7:42 pmFebruary 4, 2010 7:42 pm

Some readers have asked, in the context of my recent Congo columns, why I have named rape victims, including the name of a 9-year-old girl. Let me say at the outset that it’s the policy of the Times not to name rape victims and that making exceptions requires consultation with a senior editor. That’s a policy that makes sense to me; I didn’t consult but should have (and will in the future). In any case, let me explain my thinking here.

On the one hand, it’s impossible to get rape on the agenda when the victims are anonymous. Human beings just aren’t hard-wired to feel compassion for classes of victims, but for individuals. In my book and elsewhere, I’ve written about the research in social psychology and neurology that underscores that the only effective way to get people to care about a problem is to tell a story about an individual. For those interested in getting traction for humanitarian issues, I strongly recommend the work in this field, by Professor Paul Slovic and others. So one challenge is that if we leave out names and faces, then there’s no outrage, and the rapes go on and on. We’ve seen that in Darfur and elsewhere.

On the other hand, rape victims are already often pariahs, and putting a name or face in print or on the web could make the stigmatization eternal. Where’s the humanitarianism in trying to prevent future rapes if the method risks causing anguish, isolation and life-long stigma to particular rape survivors? And in the case of my reporting about rapes in Sudan, anyone I wrote about was also at risk of being prosecuted for fornication (if unmarried) or adultery (if married) for confessing to sexual contact without having four adult male Muslim eyewitnesses to prove that it was rape.
I agonized over these tradeoffs in Darfur in particular. My own compromise, which shaped my thinking more recently in Congo as well, involves a kind of balancing test. A starting point is obviously consent of the woman (and a guardian if she is a minor). Granted, it’s hard to ensure that the consent is meaningful in a village where the woman has never seen the Internet and doesn’t really understand what The New York Times is. But I try to explain a bit, and if we shoot a video we show what it will look like. In Congo, women listen to the radio, and so that’s their connection to the mass media, their way of understanding to some degree what I do and the way it can reach a wide audience.

The second step is to include the kind of details that give granularity without getting the person in trouble. For example, in Darfur, I often included the woman’s name and age, but that wasn’t useful information for the authorities: many people share identical names, and birthdates and ages tend to be fluid. I would never give home village or husband or father’s full name, or a location within a camp, because that might enable someone to be tracked down. I filmed against a plain backdrop so that the location couldn’t be determined. That approach seemed to work: Nobody ever got in trouble either with the authorities or with her own community for sharing her story with me, and I think the stories did lead to fewer rapes and more help for rape survivors. I’ve gone back and seen some of the women again, and they were mostly proud of having spoken up. One told me: This is how I fight genocide.

In Congo, likewise, I didn’t include the home town of the women involved. My decision to use names also reflected the isolation of the areas involved. In last Sunday’s column, for example, the dateline was Kalehe, the nearest “city,” but the individuals I wrote about live a five-hour hike from Kalehe. Nobody in the area ever sees any newspaper or the Internet. Indeed, many had never heard of President Obama, and some of those who had heard of him didn’t know if he is black or white. The people there speak no English and minimal French. In short, it seems to me that there’s zero chance that the column or video is going to reach these communities in which these women live or haunt them in any way. (They realized that, and it’s one reason why they were so forthcoming.)

This issue reflects a broader tension between journalists, whose instinct is to publish, and aid workers engaged in protection issues, whose instinct is to shield individuals. My own take is that journalists are sometimes too quick to publish, and aid workers sometimes too quick to protect individuals. The best example of that may be AIDS testing. Humanitarians opposed any kind of mandatory HIV testing and were very suspicious of voluntary testing without enormous safeguards, because there were real risks that a woman who tested positive might be kicked out of her home and left to starve on the street. That concern was warranted — but it also led to delays so that AIDS spread more widely than it otherwise would have. (You can’t fight AIDS when no one knows who has it.) Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, probably ended up with AIDS because of the humanitarian protections put in place around testing, and to me that wasn’t worth the tradeoff and was one of the big failures in AIDS strategy in southern Africa. Lots of others disagree.

My larger point, though, is simply that these are messy, difficult issues, sometimes with real tradeoffs between the individual interest and the community interest. I identified the Congo rape victims by name because I had permission and because I was completely confident that they wouldn’t get in trouble, and because I think that’s the only way to raise the issue on the agenda and stop this kind of sexual predation. But plenty of people will disagree, and in any case I’ll be consulting with editors on these identification questions in the future. I also welcome your thoughts on this topic, particularly from aid workers, assault survivors and journalists.

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